Kukla's Korner Hockey

The Pittsburgh Penguins' Jordan Staal sat out last Tuesday's game against the Florida Panthers after playing fewer than eight minutes in their previous outing against the Montreal Canadiens, a mostly understandable development for the only player from the draft class of 2006, apart from the Boston Bruins' Phil Kessel, to jump directly from junior to the National Hockey League.
With very few exceptions — and Staal's teammate with the Penguins, Sidney Crosby, is the most prominent recent one — this is the normal developmental pattern for teenage hockey players. By the start of the third month, the pace and the standard of play tend to ramp up across the board in the NHL.